Noctua NH-D15S CPU Cooler Review

Noctua brings a large CPU cooler but takes care of its overall dimensions. As installation of large air coolers is a bit tricky, thus manufacturer adopted smart implementation techniques and design for this to ease installation and match the convenience of smaller heatsinks. The Noctua NH-D15S CPU cooler is very similar to Noctua flagship NH-D15 model yet comes with an enhanced design. This CPU cooler provides extra clearance for your PCI-E devices by arranging heat pipe arrangement leading upward that was blocked by the NH-D15 model. By extending the height of the cooler with big fan, designer not only contributes to the superb CPU cooling capabilities, also offers massive airflow over surrounding motherboard components and heatsinks. The Dimensions of this cooler is 165 x 150 x 135 mm and it comes with a single fan which has a maximum rotational speed of 1500 RPM and minimum 300 RPM. But if you want to add extra fan you can do that by using the extra clips supplied with the cooler. You can use either a second round-frame 140 mm fan with 120 mm mounting holes or a common 120 mm fan (such as the NF-F12) for improving performance while maintaining compatibility with RAM modules of up to 45 mm height. The NH-D15S complying the SecuFirm2 mounting bracket system with the compatibility of following processor slots: Intel LGA2011-0 & LGA2011-3 (Square ILM), LGA1156, LGA1155, LGA1151, LGA1150 & AMD AM2, AM2+, AM3, AM3+, FM1, FM2, FM2+ (backplate required) and also can be used with the older LGA1366 and LGA775 sockets using the optional NM-I3 mounting kit, which is provided by Noctua free of charge.

Performance: We used Prime95 software to test the cooler. For 15 minutes, this software put stress on CPU which heats up the processor and we monitored the temperature with CoreTemp. We also overclocked the CPU to check the efficiency of the cooler and set up the fan speed at maximum from motherboard UEFI. Each run was performed with the Intel Core i7 3770kCPU at the following frequencies: 3.5GHz (Stock) and approx.3.9 GHz (using the Gigabyte OC Tweaker). In comparison with our existing CPU cooler, this one resulted with better results, temperature reduced by 54%.